Syria's tyrant nears day of reckoning

SYRIAN leader Bashar Assad was fighting a bloody last stand against emboldened rebels last night.

A woman is carried on a stretcher after being injured during the shelling

The despot sent warplanes to bomb anti-government troops fighting their way through the outskirts of the capital Damascus as his hated regime looked increasingly likely to topple.

Now on the back foot, Assad is resorting to sorties by his still intact air force to resist what appears to be the final gambit of a bitter civil war.

After 21 months of fighting and a death toll of nearly 40,000, a combination of sanctions, international isolation and a well-armed insurgency, Assad’s days look numbered. Only reticence in the West about the prospect of an Islamic fundamentalist regime taking over in Damascus appears to be holding back a Nato-supported intervention as witnessed in the toppling of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

On Friday David Cameron secured European Union support for a review of the embargo on ­supplying weapons to Syria’s rebels. Earlier last week former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind argued that Britain’s recognition “removes a major barrier to the supply of defensive military equipment to the Syrian resistance”.

There are fears in the West that without a military intervention thousands more will die.

Yet Syria’s foreign minister continues to blame the suffering of his country’s people on US and European sanctions. Walid al-Moallem last night called on the United Nations to condemn sanctions and work toward lifting them.

There are fears in the West that without a military intervention thousands more will die

He made his comments during a meeting in the capital with UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos who was on a one-day visit to Syria.

Signs of a stranglehold being tightened on Syria could be seen on Friday with the Pentagon’s promise to send two batteries of Patriot missiles and 400 troops to Turkey as part of a Nato force including troops from Germany and Holland.

A number of Syrian missiles have exploded on Turkish soil since the uprising started and Ankara has become one of Assad’s harshest critics, but Nato maintains the strategy is not a step towards intervention. “The deployment will be defensive only,” said Nato spokeswoman Oana Lungescu. Syrian Scud ­missiles continued to explode close to the Turkish border on Friday at the same time as the air force began targeting the Beit Sahm district on the road leading to Damascus airport. The army also fired rockets at several rebel strongholds in nearby suburbs.

As well as the growing rebel challenge, Syria faces an alliance of Arab and ­Western powers who stepped up diplomatic support for Assad’s political foes at a meeting in Morocco on Wednesday and warned him he could not win Syria’s civil war.